Happily Never After

Dear ABC, NBC, Fox, the CW, and just about every major movie studio worth a crap right now:

PLEASE KEEP YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF OF FAIRY TALES.  THANK YOU!

(Sometimes you have to change the font to prove you're serious.)

AAARRRGGHH!

(Sometimes you have to use all caps and made up words to show you're agitated.)

I'M SERIOUS DAMMIT - KNOCK IT OFF!

(And sometimes, just sometimes, you even have to use bold, italics, and a swear just a little bit to prove exactly how much of an overdramatic little literature nerd you're being about the whole situation.)

Boys and girls, I have just about had it with the current Hollywood trend of mucking around with fairy tales.  I'm tired of it, finished, fin, finito, done, over, I'm good, you can stop now and get off me (wait, was that an opinion or something said by a prom date?) 

Let's start with the movies, shall we?  2011 brought us a Little Red Riding Hood remake that most likely made one of the Brothers Grimm roll sideways in his coffin, burrow through the wood, reach over, and choke the life into and then back out of his brother's corpse.  It was a good enough flick I guess but it had about as much to do with the fairy tale as I do with designing fashion for little people that doesn't involve handles.  Yes it glossed over the basics so they could still call it Red Riding Hood, but come on people.  That's about the same as beating me with a baseball bat until I can't speak then tossing me in a wheelchair with a Speak n' Spell and trying to pass me off as Stephen-freaking-Hawking.  The only people who are going to really enjoy that show are the ones that don't know any better and the person who got to swing the bat. (NO, I'm not volunteering.  Wait, why is there a line forming outside?)

2012 doesn't seem as if it may fair any better, but in all fairness the jury is still far from finished in that deliberation.  We will be blessed with not one but two Snow White movies this year, one a Julia Roberts comedy and one a drama with the chica from Twilight.  I gotta give some credit to the venerable Ms. Stewart on this choice of role, however.  If you find yourself in a place in your career where you're about to all lose all professional credibility and finally succumb to the tween fan's demand of become all 'sparkly,' I'm not sure I could even imagine a better way to shore up the ol' resume than to do a Snow White movie filled with epic battle scenes.  Seriously, and I do mean this with all respect, will somebody find this woman a role in which she can be anything other than whiny predator bait?  While I do expect Snow White and the Huntsman to at least be watchable, I also expect Charlize Theron to overshadow anything else going on in the movie as she chews up scenery as the evil queen.  Dear Studio:  overreach on the casting much?  I'm not even going to touch the Julia Roberts as the evil queen version because, let's face it, she peaked after the first two Ocean's movies. 

As at least interesting as these two movies sound in concept, I'm very skeptical as to their faithfulness to the source material.  You can scour Netflix currently and find at least fifteen bad takes on classic fairy tales in an attempt to modernize the story.  Then you have ABC which has decided in all its broadcasting glory and wisdom to thrust Once Upon a Time upon all of us and try to make us smile while taking it deeply.  I'll once again give credit where it's due.  The show started out okay and actually had a fairly clever premise.  Now, however, it's totally devolved into some weird hybrid of a mishmash of fairy tales, Desperate Housewives, and a bad fairy tale send up porn I remember watching in college.  My wife dearly loves the show but honestly, I'm having a harder and harder time watching it just simply for the fact that it's beginning to become pandering drivel.  I barely made it through a very earnest scene in last Sunday's episode between the girl-who-used-to-be-on-House and the girl-who-used-to-be-on-Big Love without either needing alcohol and/or life support.  And while I'm at it, have you noticed lately that all the popular and at least marginally working sci-fi and fantasy actors are making the rounds between all these shows?  I swear I saw Fred from Angel on Supernatural, Grimm, Once Upon a Time, and How I Met Your Mother all within the same month.  (Granted HIMYM isn't a fairy tale, but when a gay man plays THAT straight there's got to be some pixie dust involved somewhere.)  I'm also going to give a pass to Fox's Supernatural and NBC's Grimm here just a bit.  They both butcher fairy tales with abandon on a regular basis but at least they have a tongue in cheek attitude about it and don't take themselves too seriously.

So why do these movies and television shows irritate me so badly.  Well, simply put, I'm a big fan of the source material.  Not the watered down fairy tales from when we were kids but the true, hard core stuff that made the Brothers Grimm legend.  These were the original horror stories.  These stories were the reason that things that go bump in the night bothered the good folks in Europe a couple of centuries ago.  Sorry kids but who are you going to be more afraid of, Rumpelstiltskin the Machiavellian mastermind who weekly performs a bad send up of Stephen King's Needful Things, or Rumpelstiltskin the demon who steals children to roast them on his spit?  Do the wicked stepdaughters get away with trying to steal Cinderella's prince or does his majesty swing his mighty pimp hand and order the girls' feet sliced off in strips until they fit the glass slipper?  Do both Hansel and Gretel get away clean?  Finally, and just for clarification folks, Red Riding Hood is actually cut from the belly of the wolf - the wolf isn't her father / boyfriend / whatever other romantic claptrap they want to foist upon you!  The Brothers Grimm fairy tales were mean, nasty, and honestly quite scary if you take the time to read them. 

Well here we sit, stuck with yet another week of television ripoffs of fairy tales and another summer somewhat stocked with heavily anticipated retreads of the same five hundred year old stories.  Is there anything wrong with enjoying these shows or seeing these movies?  No, they're there for entertainment.  My only concern is that there are more and more people who will just take these bastardizations as the real story and we'll inch one more step closer to a time when those stories heard around camp fires and told by agitated mothers will have slipped from literature and into history.  I guess all I'm asking for is that you do me one favor:  take whatever Team Edward or Team Jacob obsessed mongrel tween that you must tolerate on a regular basis to see Snow White and the Huntsman this summer then, as you get back to the car, wipe the popcorn grease from your fingers and give them a copy of the original Grimm's Fairy Tales.  An e-book will do in a pinch, I guess, but let's try for at least a nice copy with an actual hardback.  Better yet, stick a bookmark in it at the beginning of the Snow White story.  There now, you've done your job at an attempt to educate.  Now all you have to do is figure out how to make them read it while you're on your way to let them get something pierced.

(And sometimes you only swear once in an entire post just so your readers may catch on that this is actually worth giving a crap about...)